Last Man Standing
by more-than-words
Summary: Will finds out about what happened in Iran.


As requested by Adi: Will finding out about Iran. I fear this is pretty messy and a bit confused, but I hope it's at least a tiny little bit what you were hoping for :) x

* * *

 **Last Man Standing**

It had been a while since he had been in London, a good few months, and he was enjoying spending time with his daughter. After so long of working in a warzone, treating other people's children and seeing them live in awful conditions, it was good to be able to come back and see Annie safe and sound and well-taken care of in their nice, secure house.

Will watched as she ate the last of her breakfast, chasing scrambled eggs around the plate with her fork to make sure she got every last morsel. "How about we do something today, Annie? Just you and me. What do you say?"

She looked up from her plate, not nearly as excited as Will had been hoping she'd be. "Sure. Like what?"

He floundered for a moment; he hadn't quite thought ahead that far in the plan. The words had just come out of his mouth. Impulsive. Because that's what he was. "How about…"

Wait. His attention was caught by the small television in the corner of the kitchen. The BBC breakfast news had been playing on mute but the familiar sight of Conrad Dalton on the screen caught Will's eye and he reached for the remote to unmute the sound.

"Daddy," Annie said, trying to draw his attention back to her.

It didn't work, because Will was feeling a pit of dread, anger, _something_ in his stomach. The top story on the news was President Dalton's announcement a few hours ago about a failed coup in Iran and the involvement of US officials and the work of Secretary McCord on the ground in working to stop the plot. All of which would have been enough to grab Will's attention and start the worry churning inside of him, but then the clip of Dalton's speech ended and the newsreaders turned to an interview with their Washington correspondent, and everything got a whole lot worse.

"I understand from sources here that Secretary McCord was present when the coup attempt occurred," said the BBC's man in Washington. "Minister Javani was killed in the attack, along with both Iranian and US security personnel. We understand that the Secretary of State is now on the way back to Washington to meet with President Dalton to update him on the situation."

The interview continued, but Will didn't hear the rest of it, the sound drowned out by the rush of blood in his head.

 _Secretary McCord was present when the coup attempt occurred_.

His brain kept sticking on that sentence and coupling it with thoughts of Elizabeth, in Iran, standing in a room while guns were going off. And Javani had been killed; Will had never met the man but he knew that Elizabeth considered him an ally. It would have been him she was in Iran to see, which meant that she would have been there when he was killed. And –

Wait.

Will thought back over what had been said on the television. They had said that US security personnel had been killed.

 _Shit._

The only way US security personnel would have died in that situation was in trying to protect Elizabeth; they wouldn't have been there for any other purpose. At least one of her agents must have taken a bullet or the force of a blast. A death that had been intended for Elizabeth. It had been _that_ close.

He was aware that he was breathing hard, eyes squeezed shut and fingers tightly clutching the marble countertop of the kitchen as the emotion rose within him. There was a second where the emotion could have gone either way: distress or anger. Will took his pick. He chose anger. It felt slightly more productive.

 _Damn_ Elizabeth. She hadn't even told him that she was going to Iran; he hadn't had any idea at all that she was there. And what if she had been killed? How would he have heard of her death? A phone call from Henry?

No, probably not Henry. The guy wouldn't be able to function with grief. Stevie, probably. Or he would have seen it first on the damn breakfast news.

What the hell had his sister been thinking?

"Daddy?"

His daughter's concerned voice snapped him out of it and Will sucked in a deep breath, opening his eyes to find Annie looking at him in alarm, her breakfast finished but her fork still clutched in her little hand. Annie's eyes darted to the television screen and back.

"It's OK, sweetheart," Will told her, hoping the smile he gave her was a reassuring one. All he wanted to do was to pick up the phone and call Elizabeth and yell at her and let her know just how mad he was at her for going into a situation where she could very well have died on him. The only thing that stopped him was the memory of the news report which had said she was currently on her way back home; she was unlikely to be there if he called, and he wasn't about to risk going off at Henry when the poor guy had probably been out of his mind with worry. So Will forced himself to park it until later and the next smile he gave his daughter was a more genuine one. "Let's go out while Mommy's at work. It'll be great."

And if he was extra vigilant and held extra tight to Annie's small hand that day then, well, so be it. He did what he could to keep his family safe.

* * *

She had been about to go upstairs to bed when the phone rang.

She answered it in her home office, where she had been preparing to return to work the next day – her first day back since getting home from Iran around 36 hours ago. "Hello?"

"You couldn't have called?"

"Will?" Elizabeth paused in rifling through her briefcase at the sound of her brother's voice. Of all the people she'd been expecting to call her, he hadn't been all that high on the list. "Are you in London? What time is it there?" She thought it must be the middle of the night.

His response was curt and clipped. "Four am. Don't dodge the question. You couldn't have called?"

Completely exhausted and distracted by thoughts of climbing into bed and cuddling up with Henry, she didn't think it through quickly enough. "Called about what?" She realised a split second later. _Iran_. Her brother must have found out about Iran. Damn it. She opened her mouth to backtrack but Will beat her to it.

He was obviously pacing on the other end of the line while talking – shouting - on his cell, the quality of the phone line fluctuating wildly. "You have to ask, Elizabeth? You really have to ask me that question when I turn on the news this morning – wait, no. Yesterday morning now. When I turn on the news yesterday morning and see the president telling everyone about a coup in Iran and that you were there. When it doesn't take a genius to read between the lines of what's been released to know that you could easily have died. You have to ask?"

Elizabeth was silent for a long moment, a little taken aback by her brother's anger and still shaken enough and fragile enough from what had happened in Iran that she wasn't able to collect herself as quickly as she usually would. She drew in a shaky breath and felt tears behind her eyes. It occurred to her that before she left for Iran she hadn't even thought to call him. All of her concern had been for Henry and the kids. Not her brother.

Guilt flooded through her at the thought of someone else she would have been leaving behind if she hadn't made it back from Iran.

She would have been leaving Will on his own, after she had made a silent promise decades ago when their parents died that she'd make sure she was always there for her little brother. "Will, I –"

"But you're the saviour, aren't you?" Will cut her off.

Elizabeth recognised the antagonism in his voice and the signs of him gearing up for a rant. It had obviously been building since he first saw the news. Usually she would match him in his ire, rise to the argument in an Adams sibling disagreement. But not this time. Her head kept filling with memories of little Abdol's crying face and Javani and Fred dead on the ground and smoke clouding her vision as unknown hands lifted her from the wreckage. She couldn't fight with her brother when hearing his voice just made her want him to give her a hug, even though his level of anger suggested that wouldn't be on the cards even if he was in the room.

Will carried on. "You have to do everything yourself, you always have. Did you even think about the consequences of if everything had gone wrong in Iran? Hell, it did go wrong in Iran! But what if it had been worse, Elizabeth? What if you'd been killed, or captured? The US Secretary of State is a pretty good prize to bag and I bet there's no shortage of bad guys in that part of the world who'd be all too pleased to put a price on your head. What if something had happened to you?"

Tears were rolling down her face in hot, silent streaks. She was aware of the phone trembling in her hand. "I'm not the only one who goes to dangerous places," she said. Apparently her accusatory big sister side was well-practised enough that she didn't need to be entirely lucid for her to say her piece.

The response sounded disbelieving. "Are you honestly comparing my work with – "

"Yes." Her turn to cut him off. With the hand not holding the phone, she wiped the tears from her face. "At least when I go to dangerous places it's not because I'm running away from my responsibilities."

She knew it was a bad thing to say. She knew it wasn't going to help the situation, even if it was broadly the truth. But she couldn't cope with his anger and his words were _hurting_ her and making her despair and she didn't deserve to wallow in self-pity, not when people were dead and children had lost their father while she had managed to live. She couldn't deal with the pain so she shut Will down to cut it off at the source.

There was a long pause before her brother replied. His voice was quiet and soft and sad. "I'm really glad you're OK, Elizabeth," he said.

A quiet _click_ as he hung up the phone.

Fresh tears came then and she stood there in the office with the darkened phone in her hand, replaying memories in her head of Iran and Will and their parents, until eventually Henry came to find her and he took one look at her face before he folded her securely into his arms for a long, comforting hug before steering her up the stairs to bed.

She didn't sleep that night, or for several nights after.

* * *

He wasn't sure what he had been expecting from the phone call. He didn't know how he had wanted his sister to react, but with the benefit of hindsight he thought that maybe yelling at her when she had just been through something traumatic hadn't exactly been the best idea.

He didn't want to cause a rift with Elizabeth.

But nor did he want to be the last man standing, and he needed her to understand that. She was the last anchor to his childhood, to the days before their parents died on that awful, _awful_ day, the day that he watched his mother and father die and he swallowed a secret about his mother's death in an effort to save his sister at least a fragment of pain. He needed his sister, and he was mad that apparently she hadn't thought about that before charging into a country on the brink of a violent coup.

And he was mad that she called him out for his own forays into dangerous places.

He didn't think about what she said about him running away from his responsibilities. That way lay too much pain. Better to keep moving instead.

So, hurting and angry, Will cleaved to the habit of a lifetime and two days later left London, leaving behind a resigned Sophie and a slightly-disinterested Annie, and headed to the airport on his way to the refugee camps in Greece with the aim of providing frontline medical relief for an organisation run by a friend.

He was in the departures lounge and ten minutes away from boarding his flight from Gatwick Airport when his cell phone rang. He thought about ignoring it, suspecting it to be Sophie calling to tell him exactly what she thought of his taking off so suddenly once again, but he was surprised to see Elizabeth's name flashing on the screen when he pulled it out to check. Adrenaline rising in anticipation of the fight he expected to be coming his way, he answered it curtly. "Hey."

There was a pause before she answered. "Hi, Will."

Another pause. He could hear her quiet breathing on the other end of the line. "You know," he said, "you called _me_ … Elizabeth?" When she didn't answer again, a seed of worry started to grow in his gut. "You OK?"

She sucked in a breath. It sounded like she might be crying – or trying not to. "I'm sorry," she said, so quietly that Will could hardly hear her.

"Hold on." Phone pressed to his ear, he pushed past clusters of people on their way to catch their own planes, trying to find a quieter corner. This conversation sounded like it was an important one. Will rounded a corner and stood next to a window with a view out over the planes standing on the tarmac. He pressed his phone to one ear and jammed a finger in his other ear to try to stem some of the airport hum all around him. "Elizabeth, you still there?"

"Yeah."

He could hear her breathing. It didn't sound quite right, like her breath was being snatched away from her before she could properly inhale the oxygen, like she was chasing after the air and failing to catch it. It sounded like… panic? "Breathe," he said, trying to push aside the worry about what might have caused her distress until he was slightly less concerned about her immediate wellbeing.

"I am," she said. "I almost… it's OK now." She took another breath and this one sounded better, more normal.

For a moment, Will entertained the thought that the thought of speaking to him had been what caused her panic. Then almost immediately he stopped entertaining that thought. "OK," he said. Then he said, "I'm glad you called."

He was glad, although talking about things wasn't really something he and Elizabeth did often. He had been expecting to go to Greece without hearing anything further from her, and then by the time he got back in two months or three their disagreement would have been forgotten, never to be spoken of again. The follow-up phone call made a change – a welcome one, but one he was slightly unsure of how to handle.

"I'm sorry I didn't tell you I was going to Iran," Elizabeth said, her voice still quiet and a little wary, like maybe she was expecting him to rise to anger. "But I'm not sorry that I went."

Will watched a plane taking off outside the window. He thought it sounded like Elizabeth didn't entirely believe her second statement, although with the benefit of an extra two days and lots of late night reading of the news, Will could admit how much worse things would have been if she hadn't gone. But she was still his sister as well as the Secretary of State. Professional actions could have personal consequences. "I just… need you to stick around, you know?" he said, aware that she would hear the plea in his tone. _So don't you dare go dying on me, sis._

"Works both ways," she replied.

An announcement over the airport tannoy told him that he needed to board his flight. He ignored it. He wasn't finished with the conversation yet. "What happened in Iran, Elizabeth?"

No doubt on the other end of the phone line she was frowning. "You know what –"

He cut her off. "Tell me," he said. She had to know he wasn't asking about the politics.

There was a long pause before she answered. "I was there when it started. I saw Javani die. And Fred Cole, my security agent."

Witnessing that must have been awful. "But you're OK? Were you hurt?" He knew there was no way she'd tell him unless he asked the blunt question.

He could hear Elizabeth's dismissive shrug from half a world away. "Just needed a few stitches." It was clear that it was likely an understatement and she was leaving something unspoken, not telling him everything, but Will had enough experience of warzones to put the silence together with her earlier panic and know that she was struggling. He felt a pang inside him at the thought of her being hurt; it reminded him how close it had been, how she had been in the same room as death.

It reminded him of other things, too, from years gone by.

"Is Henry being good to you? Making sure you're all right?" he asked softly, already knowing what the answer would be. There was no way Henry wouldn't be stepping up to take good care of her.

"When does he not?" Elizabeth said with a smile in her voice.

"Good. That's good." It helped reassure Will that his sister would be OK, eventually. He had more questions for her. Both the doctor and the brother in him wanted to know exactly how she had been injured, the medical attention she had received, if the care had been up to standard. But he knew she would become defensive fast if he pushed the issue, and she sounded like she was on a hair trigger and he didn't want to do anything that might set off the lingering panic. He wanted to know how she had made it out of Iran with so much violence unfolding around her, when at least one of her security team had been killed and the routes out of Tehran had to have been limited.

He wanted to ask her about how she had survived, because he thought it might answer some of his questions about how _he_ had survived that day that their parents didn't.

He wanted to ask how she was coping, because it might teach him how to better cope. Then he remembered the sound of her stuttered breathing at the beginning of the phone call and he thought that maybe neither of them had ever really learned how to cope.

They just carried on: her to one of the most powerful government jobs in the country and him to wherever the latest humanitarian crisis just so happened to be.

They dealt with the absences in their lives by making the topic itself absent.

Another announcement came over the tannoy and he really needed to leave to catch his flight.

"Are you at the airport?" Elizabeth asked.

Will watched a plane outside as it came in to land. "Yeah."

"Where are you going?" The question was so carefully neutral that it only made her disappointment in him sound all the more obvious.

"Greece. The refugee camps there." Will was aware that his answer would only solidify in Elizabeth's mind her assessment of him from two days ago: that he was always running away from his responsibilities. Like his daughter and his wife.

Running away from _her_. "Oh," said Elizabeth. Something in her voice had changed and hardened; she no longer sounded lost and broken and drifting, she sounded sure. She sounded like she sounded when she was dealing with something familiar – the familiar scenario of her brother going away again.

It made him feel guilty, but he needed to go. He _had_ to do it.

"I hope you have a good trip," she said, and she clearly both meant it and didn't mean it at the same time.

Will smiled a sad smile, catching his reflection in the glass in front of him. He looked away, not wanting to meet his own eye. He didn't want to end the conversation on a sour note but he wasn't sure how to rescue it. "I'll see you when I get back. We'll get together."

She ignored his statement. "You need to go and get your flight."

"I'll see you soon," he insisted, feeling the need to stress the point, feeling his own surge in panic that it seemed to be so easy to lose the connection with his sister so soon after she had reached out to him, all because he was unable to stay still for any length of time.

It reminded him that some wounds never healed.

He hoped that the wounds left by what happened in Iran would heal for Elizabeth.

"Yeah, see you," Elizabeth replied, a little noncommittal. Then she said in the tone of an order, "Stay safe."

She hung up the phone before he could reply and despite the fact they were calling his flight once again – _last call for passengers_ – he stood at the airport window for several minutes more, looking out at the planes landing and taking off, everyone in them with a destination in mind while he stood adrift and alone in the airport, aware of something missing, aware that Elizabeth had been reaching out for him and hoping he'd take the bait even as she suspected that he wouldn't, aware that he no longer really knew how to stay. He thought of her almost dying in Iran, thought of losing her.

Those weren't good thoughts.

Will turned his mind then to less personal matters, matters from which he was more detached, and following the habit of a lifetime he went to board his plane.

At least when he arrived at his destination he might be able to save some lives. It would distract him from thoughts of the ones that he had lost already in his life – and the ones he still had to lose.


End file.
